I would be in favor of keeping the corner if the half wall was lower than counter height - ie opens up the use of the kitchen but maybe a little different configuration = like a cabinet that opened out into the other area in the corner, drift the 12" that the corner cab was taking on the range wall down to join the 9" cabinet. Then add to the opposite side of the corner something like a 27" wide, narrow depth open shelf unit, maybe a reduced depth ?15" deep base. I think you said that is actually the main entrance for both the kitchen and family room. With the corner there, it kinda helps shunt people away from the cooking area, and family members will probably drop their junque on it. Dunno if that will play out in real life because a lot of people seem to be magically attracted to the refrigerator. Otherwise, I would rather have the straight counter with a pair of 30-36" drawer cabinets. I would also cut the little upper cabinets and do the stand alone hood. I could put a rack unit on the wall to recapture some storage if I needed.

lyfia, I was hoping that table-cleaning would happen after cooking & eating. I was also hoping that whoever carries the dirty dishes could walk around the other end of the island, i.e., the hallway area, to get to the sink. :) Lisa, Sena -- Thank you so much for your replies. Lots of good suggestions! I came up with a revision last night based on Lisa and everyone else' suggestions, before seeing your grand drawings. I attached my revision below, but will study your drawings tonight and update my amateur drawing accordingly. :) RE: the dressing room. I have to agree it was a very bad idea to have the door face the hallway, LOL. So I re-arranged the entrance to the master suite and the study, but introduced a new problem -- no windows in the bedroom. Having double glass doors between the study and the bedroom would help somewhat. If I increase the ceiling height from 10' (9' under beams) to 12', I could fit a nice row of transom/clerestory windows above the 84" wardrobes. 12' ceiling might be too high and costly, though. RE: master bath. We currently have double sinks (7' vanity), and think that two is not necessary and one might be just fine (yay to one fewer sink for me to clean), so I put down one. We feel the current 3' x 4' shower is a bit small, so I increased the size, but I probably overshoot by doubling it. I will change it to 4' x 5'. I increased the exterior footprint by 2', from 49' x 39' to 51' x 41', so I could widen the staircase to 42", give a little more room to the kitchen range wall, and allow some space for the powder room and laundry room. I put the bath and laundry in the northwest corner, as I kind of want to have the northeast corner to myself, i.e., for bed and study, because I notice that in our current house, the most pleasant places tend to be near the northeast and southeast corners. These places are bright but not too bright, and don't get overly hot. Is that selfish thinking? I imagine to use the front door more often. With our current house, we always enter through the kitchen door which faces the attached garage. We only use the grand front entry when the garage door is stuck, or when there are guests who need help loading or unloading their vehicle(s). I feel like we should use what we have more often, especially nice things. I think by locating the detached garage closer to the front entry, perhaps in the northwest corner, might help us achieve that. In that case, having the laundry/bath near the front entry would make sense. As for unloading grocery, I imagine to use a small rolling cart to get things from the car to the kitchen. Also could have the car stop at the kitchen door for a moment, LOL, although this probably would require a longer driveway. Now, I am not exactly sure about the purpose of the kitchen door.. Oh, right, DH wants a door off the kitchen so that when he grills food outside, he can come into the kitchen to quickly grab spices, put away trash, etc, without going through other areas. I love the idea of separating the fridge and freezer. Our current fridge/freezer (all-in-one) is 36" and I find it quite full after each weekend visit to the farmers' market. So we thought we could use a bigger one. I am thinking of a 30" fridge and a 30" freezer. I kept the freezer next to the pantry, so it's close to the microwave, which in turn is close to the sink/trash. Like Sena suggested, I moved the fridge to the range wall, as placing it at the end of the sink run (what Lisa suggested initially) will make the door space too tight because the posts are actually structural (which I will explain below). Lisa, great point about gunk collecting on the counter strip behind the range. As you've already guessed (correctly), I'd take the low-maintenance route, i.e. 24" range counter. But since I just moved the fridge to the range wall, I probably should stick to 30" counter, right? I also have to admit, I've never thought I would "have to get out the vacuum's crevice tool to go around each post". I might be able to delegate that task to my DH, LOL, as I often ask him to clean the floor under the bed. :) Anyway, the posts are there for structural reasons (think of a timber frame house), but I do try to place them in such a way that they visually define the space. I also try to center windows/ table/ entry door/ etc on posts. While it's cheaper to build a rectangle shaped house, I think bump-outs are entirely possible, even with timber frame houses...I just don't know if they are expensive to add. Looking at the gable end (i.e., the kitchen/ study exterior wall), the post distance (center-to-center) in my drawing below is 14'-10'-14'. It can be changed to 14'-14'-14', 12'-10'-14', 12'-12'-12', etc, as long as two adjacent posts are no more than 14' apart. Along the eave/ ridge, two adjacent posts can be up to 20' apart. I agree the posts make the kitchen design difficult. There is some freedom in the placement of the kitchen posts -- we could move the two freestanding posts (one next to the fridge, the other next to the island) towards either the dining room or the kitchen sink. Could also deepen the pantry/hallway area, by making the two posts in the middle (looking at the gable end, one at the end of the sink counter run, the other in the study) further apart, like 12'-14' (vs. 10'), but the overall house will be deeper too, and I don't know if that's desirable. The upside of deepening the pantry/hallway area is, I would be able to place the fridge at the end of the sink run without making the door space too tight, and as a result, the range counter run can be lengthened. Lisa - Sorry, I don't have the floor plan for the upstairs and the breezeway yet. I only recently started learning to use the chief architect software, and the user guide says it's best to finalize the main floor before adding more floors, so I've been focusing on improving the main floor. I probably could add a gable roof quickly and generate an exterior view, though. I still need to add basement, second floor (half story), garage, and breezeway. It will take me a while to get all these done, but I will keep you posted! This post was edited by ILoveCookie on Wed, Oct 9, 13 at 12:47

Well, we're coming along nicely. I'll get some pix posted as soon as it's a little further on; with the old kitchen still in situ it's kind of hard to get pictures that capture the full impact of what they're doing, so I'll wait until I can take some pictures that have the "wow" factor :) The wall between kitchen and diner is now COMPLETELY gone and, despite my trepidation, it's going to be absolutely wonderful to have it as an open space. The whole house feels twice the size, it improves the vista from the front and it's going to be a wonderful family space - we're thrilled! We've hit the first couple of "oh phooey" compromises that our 2nd-hand cabinets situation generates: because of the previous handles placement, one of the cabinets next to the stove will have to open the "wrong" way. I think I can tweak the other side (one of the new cabinets) by turning it into a pullout (which I was considering doing anyway) and I can live with it, but it is a minor annoyance. However, we knew there would be little things along the way that we would have to deal with and, regardless, it's still SO much nicer than what we had that I can't really complain (well, I could, I suppose, but I'm not going to... or not much, anyway!! :) My faucet still hasn't turned up, so I'm anticipating a bit of a battle on that - it's the first time I've EVER had a problem on Ebay and I'm not quite sure how to proceed, but I'll figure it out in due course. In the meantime, I think I have another faucet picked and (shhhhh - don't tell anybody!) I think I actually prefer it for the revised and now open layout... ;) Biggest challenge now is backsplash and paint - I STILL can't seem to settle on anything! More tile-shopping tomorrow and Wednesday - have to at least get stuff ordrered so it's ready to install when they get to it! Anyway, just an update. We're getting there!

Thanks everyone for your comments. A few responses from us so far: -The kitchen diagram is accurate within an inch or less -We thought the fridge would be good close to the dinning room (where it is) so that the people setting the table (or people getting snacks/drinks from the living room) wouldn't be walking through the cook zone. My DH also feels that tucking it on this run keeps the kitchen feeling open instead of having a large fridge as the focal point of the kitchen. -We don't have/use a microwave, so we don't need a space for this appliance -The fridge is an all fridge (we have an all freezer in the little room off the kitchen where the washer/dryer is). We are looking at the Electrolux icon (19 cubic feet). We are currently using a 12 cubic foot fridge now (small apartment)- so we are looking forward to the luxurious extra 7 cubic feet!! :) - The dishwasher location seems like a no-win. It's going to block off the aisle whether its on the island or on the stove run. I do like the idea of having the pots stored in drawers between the stove and the sink for easy access and cleanup- so I defaulted to the island location for the dishwasher. I am always open to suggestions or better ideas though. My DH also wanted me to add that he likes that the dishwasher (in the island) will not be a focal point as you enter the kitchen- he likes to minimize the amount of stainless steel seen when you enter the room. -The window cannot be moved left or right or made wider (without spending lots of $$). We did want more light, so we opted to made the window counter height and much taller to get maximum light. - Love your idea about a message/command center. We plan to have a key landing in the boot room by the coats. Based on your comment, we are also planning on doing some type of built in (shallow) storage for phone charging, mail and message center. We think this might fit well on the bottom right corner of the kitchen (by the laundry room)- this space might also be good at it leads to the hallway that will be used to access the rest of the house. -we have decided not to store our (elaborate) set recycling bins in the kitchen. There is room for this system in the laundry space. This frees up some real estate in the kitchen. Some questions that I had: -what are the advantages to a single bowl sink? I like to keep my dry rack in one sink so that it's out of sight instead of on the counter. I do like to option of the large size of a single sink though...so I would like to know what others think about the pros and cons of each. -what does everyone think about seating at the island? We were thinking of having 2-3 stools on the long end and one on the short end. Would this be too tight? -The island is 5 feet on the graph paper diagram, but our kitchen cabinet guy suggested a 6 foot long island. Thoughts? Would this extra foot cut off traffic or would the extra length be beneficial? -Any thoughts on supersusans? We are now thinking of using our corner cabinet to store appliances such as food processor, blender, slow cooker etc. Our thought was that we hate accessing stuff in a corner cabinet, and these are items that we don't use often. -Any thoughts/advice for steam producing appliances? We drink a lot of tea- so our kettle is always blowing steam and we like to steam milk, so the steamer on the espresso machine is blowing steam daily. Is there any treatments to protect cabinets or do you mostly try to keep these items away from cabinets? Is this even an issue or am I over thinking it? -should we put some type of door on the boot room or leave it open? -currently, the laundry area is open and we are enclosing it (along with our freezer and recycling system). What types of doors would go best on this small room? FYI there is a transom window letting light in above the w/d and freezer- so we plan on putting some type of opening above these doors to allow this light to pass though into the kitchen. Sorry for the novel. Thanks for all of your input!! Let me know if you need more info or details.